Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (42 page)

At that time Edward had just begun his much-prolonged period of sick-leave; a serious injury to the nerves of his arm caused him intense pain for months, and involved a course of massage which lasted for nearly a year. One late summer evening I came off duty to find a pencilled post-card from him, telling me that he and my father had been inspecting a block of flats in Kensington, where my parents soon afterwards went to live and have remained to this day.

The rest of the post-card was brief:

‘Father came up this morning . . . He brought with him a letter from France addressed to me which contains the following: “To /2nd-Lt. E. H. Brittain. The G.O.C. congratulates you on being awarded the Military Cross by the Commander-in-Chief.” ’

12

Already, I thought, his prayer at Roland’s grave had been answered - by himself. In 1916, it should be added, the M.C. meant a good deal; it was still a comparatively rare decoration, awarded only for acts of really conspicuous courage.

‘Isn’t it too unspeakably splendid about Edward’s Military Cross?’ I wrote to my mother. ‘And how like him to send you a post card, when anybody else would have wired . . . You must come down soon and see him wearing the ribbon . . . Other officers turn round and look at him and he never appears to notice it . . . Isn’t it amusing to think with what reverence and awe he used to point out to us an officer who had the Military Cross. He says he will undoubtedly get promotion now - though what does it matter if you are a 2nd-Lieut. all your days, when you are an M.C.!’

At first my one regret was that Roland - always so sympathetic and yet just a little sceptical over Edward’s unavailing efforts to get to France - would never know how courageously and completely he had turned the tables on the scornful senior officers who left him behind when the regiment went to the front. But almost at once I realised that it was best that Roland, dead and undecorated, could not know; his reflections would have been too bitter. He had been so definitely ‘after’ the Military Cross, had thought it more to be desired than the Nobel Prize, and his fellow-officers in the 7th Worcesters had shared our confidence that some high military distinction would be his fate. Yet he had gone unadorned to his grave without taking part in a single important action, while the friend who had been a mere peace-loving musician wore the coveted decoration. How could he have endured, the next autumn term, to be a silent witness of Edward’s clamorous reception at Uppingham? - a reception such as we had often imagined for himself, but had never even thought possible for Edward, except perhaps years and years later as a great violinist and composer.

The ironies of war, I reflected sadly, were more than strange; in terms of a rational universe they were quite inexplicable. But now the universe had become irrational, and nothing was turning out as it once seemed to have been ordained.

Edward’s award was officially announced in
The Times
of October 21st, 1916, under the heading of ‘Rewards for Gallantry: Short Stories of Brave Deeds’:

‘Temp. Sec.-Lt. EDWARD HAROLD BRITTAIN, Notts and Derby R. - For conspicuous gallantry and leadership during an attack. He was severely wounded, but continued to lead his men with great bravery and coolness until a second wound disabled him.’

But when I read this notice, I was far away from both Edward and England.

With the coming of summer weather and increased activity on the various fronts, small groups of Sisters and V.A.D.s had begun to leave Camberwell for foreign service, chiefly in France. During the rush of work after the Somme, when every London hospital needed its full quota of nurses, the exodus had temporarily ceased, but as soon as the convoys slackened a Sister and two V.A.D.s were ordered, to my secret terror, to leave for service on a hospital ship, the
Glenart Castle
. Their names had been just above Betty’s and mine on the list of active service volunteers; from this we knew that our own summons would not be long delayed, and each privately prayed that when it came it might be for France.

At the beginning of September I was due for leave, which seemed more than ever desirable after an attack by thirteen German airships on September 2nd had deprived London of a whole night’s rest. The heavy work of July and August in the incessant heat of that long London summer had left me limp and jaded, and I left Euston for Macclesfield, where my parents were still living, with a sense of profound relief.

On Macclesfield station my father met me with the news that a telegram awaited me at the house. Hurrying there in a taxi, I opened and read it; it announced that I was ordered on foreign service, and recalled me to Camberwell at once.

After scrambling through a dinner which I could hardly eat for fatigue and excitement, I caught the last train back to London. Too tired, too apprehensive and too bitterly disappointed at losing my leave to read or to sleep, I found the second long journey interminable. It was almost midnight when I tramped wearily through the silent slums between Camberwell New Road and our flat, but Betty was lying awake in bed, waiting for my return. When she heard me at the door she called through the window that both of us were ordered east, probably to Malta.

7

Tawny Island

WE SHALL COME NO MORE

So then we came to the Island,
Lissom and young, with the radiant sun in our faces;
Anchored in long quiet lines the ships were waiting,
Giants asleep in the peace of the dark-blue harbour.
Ashore we leapt, to seek the magic adventure
Up the valley at noontide,
Where shimmering lay the fields of asphodel.

O Captain of our Voyage,
What of the Dead?
Dead days, dead hopes, dead loves, dead dreams, dead sorrows—
Do the Dead walk again?

To-day we look for the Island,
Older, a little tired, our confidence waning;
On the ocean bed the shattered ships lie crumbling
Where lost men’s bones gleam white in the shrouded silence.
The Island waits, but we shall never find it,
Nor see the dark-blue harbour
Where twilight falls on fields of asphodel.

V. B. 1932.

1

The memory of my sunlit months in the Mediterranean during the War’s worst period of miserable stagnation still causes a strange nostalgia to descend upon my spirit. For me, as for all the world, the War was a tragedy and a vast stupidity, a waste of youth and of time; it betrayed my faith, mocked my love, and irremediably spoilt my career - yet Malta remains in my recollection as an interval of heaven, a short year of glamorous beauty and delight, in which, for the time being, I came to life again after Roland’s death.

Quite why the island should have had this effect upon me I do not know, for I went to Malta in peril, I arrived there in pain, I was often lonely and homesick, and I left in the deepest depths of sorrow and abnegation. Nevertheless, the enchantment remains. The place has become for me a shrine, the object of a pilgrimage, a fairy country which I know that I must see again before I die. Looking back through the years to sun-filled memory-pictures of golden stone buildings, of turquoise and sapphire seas, of jade and topaz and amethyst skies, of long stretches of dust-white road winding seaward over jagged black rocks older than history, I am filled with yearning and regret, and I cry in my heart: Come back, magic days! I was sorrowful, anxious, frustrated, lonely - but yet how vividly alive! Take away this agreeable London life of writing, of congenial friends, of minor successes for which I fought so long and worked so hard, take away my pleasant Chelsea home that would have seemed in the Buxton days an unattainable Paradise - and give me back that lovely solitude, that enchanted obscurity, those warm shimmering mornings of light and colour, those hours of dreaming in hot scented fields of oxalis and gladioli and asphodel !

But I know that those things will never come back. I may see the rocks again, and smell the flowers, and watch the dawn sunshine chase the shadows from the old sulphur-coloured walls, but the light that sprang from the heightened consciousness of wartime, the glory seen by the enraptured ingenuous eyes of twenty-two, will be upon them no more. I am a girl no longer, and the world, for all its excitements of chosen work and individualistic play, has grown tame in comparison with Malta during those years of our anguish.

It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem - a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o’-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.

I do not believe that a League of Nations, or a Kellogg Pact, or any Disarmament Conference, will ever rescue our poor remnant of civilisation from the threatening forces of destruction, until we can somehow impart to the rational processes of constructive thought and experiment that element of sanctified loveliness which, like superb sunshine breaking through thunder-clouds, from time to time glorifies war.

2

On the late afternoon of Saturday, September 23rd, 1916, a large tender carried a party of excited and apprehensive young women down the glittering expanse of Southampton Water. The tender had orders to embark them on H.M. Hospital Ship
Britannic
, which was sailing next day for Mudros in order to bring home the chronically sick and wounded from various Eastern campaigns. Betty and I, by far the youngest of the group, were also the most excited and certainly not the least apprehensive, for a persistent wonder whether I should ever see Edward or Victor or Geoffrey again caused a lump in my throat and a dull ache at the pit of my stomach.

The mingled depression and exhilaration of that day still lives in the pages of my diary.

‘Mother and Edward . . . spent an hour or two with me this morning before our final departure. I bade them a last
au revoir
at the corner of Brief Street, as I did not want to watch them walk away.

‘We left the hospital with Miss C. in a ’bus and met Principal Matron at Waterloo. I hated Waterloo and the Southampton express; there was such a general bustle and noise and confusion which somehow seemed to intensify the feeling that we were going away . . . I felt acutely miserable, not so much at the idea of leaving England and everybody (for since Roland went the long, long journey no place in the world seems so very far away from any other place) as because everything was so unsettled and I hate things to be unsettled and not know at all what is going to happen to me . . . In spite of the depressing effect of the ’bus and Waterloo it was a great relief to me to leave Camberwell . . . So much had I grown to hate it that I felt that any change, to however much worse physical conditions, would be a welcome relief . . .

‘At 4.0 we all assembled at the dock . . . As we left the harbour a transport of the R.F.C. cheered us and waved their hats. We sailed down the Solent just as the sun was setting; on either side of us the colours of the mainland were vividly beautiful. The sinking sun made a shimmering golden track on the water which seemed to link us in our tender to the England we were leaving behind, and in the evening light the aeroplanes and seaplanes which now and again flew round us looked like fairy things.’

When we came near to the Isle of Wight, the
Britannic
, anchored off Cowes, appeared in the distance like a huge white mammoth lying on its side. For a moment a sick dread had seized me when I learnt that she had been built as sister ship to the
Titanic
, but as I watched her scarlet crosses and four large funnels gleaming in the low sunshine, I consoled myself by reflecting that her conversion into a hospital ship had removed her to a different category. During the winter of 1915 she had run between England and Mudros, but her use was discontinued after the evacuation of the Dardanelles. Now that the Balkans had become active she was to start again, and this journey to Mudros, where those of us destined for Malta had to tranship, was the maiden voyage of her new series.

I had hardly begun to unpack in the luxurious inner cabin which I was to share with Betty, when we were summoned to listen to an address by the Sister-in-Charge of the Malta contingent on the behaviour expected from the V.A.D.s on board. Her injunctions involved so frequent a repetition of the words: ‘They may not . . . they shall not . . .’ that we should soon have become openly mutinous had not a tranquillising service on the deck next morning before we sailed reminded us how futile were little hot-headed rebellions against injudicious severity in face of the hazards that might be before us. By the time that we had sung ‘Jesu, Lover of my soul’, and listened to an idealistic red-haired chaplain telling us that ‘for a certain high type of human nature the far and the perilous thing has always had an alluring charm’, some of us were ready to confront danger and suffer martyrdom to the limit of endurance.